


The Hoard

by Miazaz



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Flash Fic, Introspection, but not shippy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-15
Updated: 2018-01-15
Packaged: 2019-03-05 01:46:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13377522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miazaz/pseuds/Miazaz
Summary: Vex isn't the only one with an iron-like grip on the things she holds dear.Percy, and all the things he can't let go.





	The Hoard

**Author's Note:**

> I'm incapable of writing either Percy or Vax without a special appearance by the other, no matter how hard I try. It's a Problem.

In the first days of Vox Machina, before they were Vox Machina, Percy used to hoard his time, his space, his privacy, as best he could, considering he was traveling with seven other people. He bristled, he found further spaces from camp, citing his long his ranged weapons as justification for the space.

He was more successful in the beginning.

He doesn't know what the turning point is exactly, but he is more than comfortable in blaming one of the twins, if not the other, for dragging him closer, closer into the group. He remembers Vax, specifically heckling him from the sidelines into arguments or showing off. He remembers Vex, stealing glances in the back, rolling her eyes at him as if the group ahead were part of some joke that only he could understand.

The first time Vax grabs his hands during a night watch and pulls him from his work with a pointed look, it stabs deep into his memory and awakens a long, long ache in his chest. He leans in and ruffles his hair with a rough touch, earning something akin to a growl from his dry throat.

It makes Vax pull back quickly and the ache yawns open, Julius's voice laughing from somewhere within it.

"You'll go blind straining in the dark light that, Freddie," he says, face more severe than Percy's used to seeing. He tilts his head, furrows his perfect brows - damn elves - as he scrutinizes the human even closer. "Did you even sleep last night? You look like _utter_ shit. Go to bed. I got this."

The tone of his voice is harsh, lips pulled tight. He opens his mouth to argue, but his brain refuses to fill in the silence, so he shoves his effects into his bag and stalks over to the rest of the party, muttering a soft apology to Vex for stirring her from sleep, though she forgives him with a molasses-slurry "of course, darling," and rolls over again, reaching back to paw at his arm for a pat. Warmth bubbles up behind his ribs and the sharp edges of his memory smooth over just a little.

Vex doesn't require nearly as much of the theatrics. She simply hands him food or steins of water, pulls him out of the workshop by asking for advice or announcing that dinner is finished, and he'll come up, now, before it gets cold.

Several times his head seems to shatter deep inside, a barbed wire edging a broken glass globe around his brain before Vex hands him a handful of travel rations or strip of jerky, with a noted comment about him missing breakfast, or lunch, or both. Once or twice she's slapped a canteen into his hands and he grips it despite the sandpaper drag of his gloves against his skin, mouth too tack-dry to say anything more than an incoherent platitude.

There is a marked difference in his instincts, he thinks.

He knows his guns. He knows what every click, clink and thud means, where it comes from, what every minute step higher or lower in sound changes to the repairs needed. He can take it apart in his sleep (he's done it before), and put it back together blinded (he may have wagered on this), can tell through his gloves the ridges of each grip of every piece. He knows the wear of gears behind his trigger.

In all the ways he knows his guns are the ways he's unlearned the warning signs of his body. It doesn't matter when his hands shake, he knows how to wrap his fingers to compensate. When his vision blurs, he knows the magnifier lens to add to correct and tighten his view.

It gets comfortable. More than comfortable -- he begins to crave it, to love it, to hoard that himself. Stealing pieces of Keyleth's time for himself, inviting her into his workspace. Agitating Vax into sharp barbs to trade, rolling wit through his mind. It's over a year now before he realizes how used to it he's become, haunting the halls of Whitestone at night in the cold and quiet and for the first time feeling like a disparate entity from his found family in a moment that feels as long as he's held them against chest.

Then Ripley, then Glintshore, then Death and Orthax, and the eternity yawning before him of darkness and solitude save for his sins until until _until_.

Solitude feels different after that. Everything feels different after that. Sometimes, before, the world around him felt dark and deep, stark and hard against the brightness and light of his little group, a boundary that felt as real as the borders of Emon, until Keyleth ripped the constraint apart and Vex pulled him from it, the taint and poison leaking out into the world and away from under his heart. It makes the moments at the dark, the moments in the night, with the rest of the family safe asleep, feel less gaping and void, and something more resembling a secret, lonely yet but powerful.

The addition of Vex to his bed - or his to hers, it's hard to say, everything of his has always felt like hers, before, even his history - made those quiet moments in the still even more precious, knowing when he finds it time to crawl back into the nest of blankets Vex has gathered up around in a wrapped pile that she will mechanically wrap herself around him without ever waking. That there is a creature, warm bright and alive in all the mess and beautiful waiting to hold him home.

That now, proof and tangible, he has a choice.


End file.
